Newest articles on The Sacramento Press tagged as "child protective services"

Juvenile Seeks to Rein in CPS Abuses through Legislation

2012-02-01T20:13:24Z

Now that Eric Smith, (not real name) a 17-year-old foster child, has been declared a dependent of the court, he is on a mission to change the laws that regulate CPS. “No one should have to go through what I did,” he said, citing his nine months in CPS custody last year. “They treated me like I was a villain, instead of a victim. Why? Because they can.” Eric wants to see that stop.

Just shy of 18, Eric is not yet able to fully tell his story. But that is not stopping him from writing letters to political officials and child welfare groups, recounting his experiences and proposing legislative changes. And what he can tell of his story, he does.

On April 1 2011, an emergency CPS social worker was dispatched to Eric’s high school to meet with him. CPS had received a phone call citing concern of emotional abuse in his home.

It was not the first call to CPS as court records would later show. But it was the first call to claim concern that Eric, who had attempted suicide before, might again attempt to take his life. A little-known provision in Welfare and Institution Code 300(c) allows the court to take jurisdiction if a child is suffering serious emotional damage.

The social worker who interviewed Eric that Friday afternoon promised him he would not need to return home. “She said she had a safety plan for me. But first she wanted to meet me at my house to talk with my mom.”

The social worker got to the house first. Eric arrived minutes later but retreated into a hallway at the sound of laughter. The social worker had discovered what Eric knew she would. It was what had kept him from confiding in others for 16 years. Eric’s mother was herself a former CPS social worker. Eric knew he wouldn’t stand a chance of getting the help he needed.

The two women gossiped like school chums, about coworkers, about supervisors, but mostly about Eric. “I knew he was lying,” he heard the social worker say to his mother.

Not less than an hour after arriving at the house, the social worker packed up her bags and closed the case. Before leaving, she placed a phone call. “Is Eric Smith at your house?” she said after identifying herself. “If he is, you need to return him immediately. There is no abuse in this home.”

Eric, crouching in the hallway, bolted.

It would be nine months before Eric would hear the words he’d doubted ever hearing, delivered at the final court hearing: “There is clear and convincing evidence of severe emotional abuse in this home.”

Eric’s story takes twists and turns to outrage even the most cynical. It’s a story he plans to tell in full one day. What he can reveal now is that the initial emergency social worker was removed from his case, a second was assigned and removed, and then a third and a fourth.

“All four social workers assigned to me over the past eight months put me through hours of crude and offensive questioning, consistently siding with my mother,” Eric said.

The second social worker was assigned after Eric bolted from his house. He had sought shelter with a friend until CPS could be notified. Unwilling to relinquish control to CPS, Eric’s mother allowed the second social worker to “voluntarily” place Eric in the Sacramento Children’s Receiving Home. On his second day in the home, his mother cut off all contact with his friends, his therapist, and his adult brother, claiming they had “brainwashed” her son. It was nine months before CPS would allow him contact with them again.

“CPS did not listen to me or believe me. They tried to put words in my mouth. They twisted facts. They tried to convince me of things that were not true and persuade me out of things that were true.”

Mike Johnson (not real name) was one of those social workers. Johnson reviewed the case and questioned Eric repeatedly. “He sat me down and said, ‘I am telling you, you never heard the words “there is no abuse in this home’ that afternoon. Do you understand?’”

“He wanted to cover for the social worker. He tried to tell me that I did not witness what I had seen with my own eyes and heard with my own ears.”

Johnson further told Eric that no court had ever taken jurisdiction under Welfare and Institution Code 300(c) and to expect to be sent back home. Emotional abuse could not be proved. It was his word against his mother’s. He was a teenage boy. She was a former CPS social worker and foster mother.

Thus began weeks of relentless interrogation. Johnson, as well as each new social worker, continued to side with his mother, accusing him of fabricating his story. When Eric asked them to interview his friends and other family members to corroborate his story, the social workers refused, saying juvenile cases are confidential to protect the privacy of the minor. Anyway, CPS added, they are not parties to the case.

“They told me I was lying,” Eric said. “They told me I was having a sexual affair with my friend’s mother. That she was having an affair with my therapist. They told me that my therapist was a quack. That I was not suicidal. If I was being abused, where were the scars? They believed everything my mother said. And they refused to talk to anyone else.”

Eric was put on 24/7 suicide watch for six months and told that “if I tried to run away or contact my therapist or friends, I would be placed in another city in a group home.” Johnson threatened the friend’s family with restraining orders if they so much as tried to contact Eric.

Meanwhile, the boy’s mother was being investigated on a separate matter. Her two-year-old foster child was removed, and she was charged with felony abuse of an adult dependent—her severely disabled adoptive daughter. Still, CPS hammered Eric with accusations. They recommended to the juvenile court that the case be closed and Eric be sent home.

Eric considered appealing to the State Foster Care Ombudsman until he learned that the ombudsman would go directly to the offending social worker to disclose the nature of the complaint as well as the identity of the child. It was a case of the fox guarding the hen house.

After six months in temporary placement—chosen by his mother—Eric finally received court permission to his petition to be placed in a foster home. Eric had been through dozens of hearings and still his case hung in the balance. Still CPS insisted there was no abuse in his home.

In early October, Eric’s foster father received a panicked phone call from the high school principal, followed by several calls from CPS. The police were looking for him. Eric’s French teacher had assigned a ten-minute free writing exercise and become alarmed at what she’d read:

The system has failed me. I have been denied the love, influence, and support from those who mean the most to me. Why? The simple answer is because they can. I am being punished by the very institutions put in place to help me....They say I am in ‘Protective Custody’ (that’s a laugh). I am the only one fighting for me.... No doubt in anyone’s minds why CPS will go to every length to protect one of their own.... I am going to escape. Come and watch the fireworks.

In November, the Juvenile Court declared Eric’s home unsafe to return to, bringing the CPS ordeal to an end.

“I felt trapped in a system meant to help me. Not only was I harassed, disbelieved, and mistreated by CPS, but I was denied access to the people I loved and needed the most. The laws meant to protect me, protected CPS.”

According to the attorney who worked on Eric’s case, “CPS works within a cloak of governmental immunity. Without a change in legislation, what’s hidden in the dark will stay in the dark.”

“Social workers need special training to recognize emotional abuse under WIC 300(c),” Eric said. “CPS put me through hell, and there was nothing I could do.”

With a rueful smile, he added, “I am nameless and faceless now. But in nine months, I will be 18. I will have a face. And I will be able to tell the whole story.”

Make holiday dreams come true for Sacramento foster youth

2011-11-23T00:25:34Z

SACRAMENTO – As foster youth in the Sacramento area spend the holidays away from home, local residents can ensure they still have stockings and presents to open, thanks to United Way’s Women in Philanthropy and Sacramento County’s Gifts From The Heart program.

“I cannot imagine how lonely it must feel to be removed from your home, especially during the holidays,” said Lisa Watts, chair of United Way’s Women in Philanthropy. “This is a fantastic way to give back during the holiday season and know that your gift will brighten the holidays for a hurting child.”

Visit www.yourlocalunitedway.org to sign up to bring specific gifts for children in Sacramento County’s Child Protective Services or to provide a $30 donation to purchase a holiday stocking for a foster youth preparing for emancipation. All items must be received by 4 p.m. on Dec. 5 at United Way’s office, 10389 Old Placerville Road, Sacramento. For more information, contact Kaila Ricci at kricci@uwccr.org or (916) 856-3910.

Holiday gifts will be distributed through Sacramento County’s Gifts From The Heart program, and stockings will be distributed through United Way’s certified nonprofit partners that work with foster youth preparing to leave the foster care system.

United Way’s Women in Philanthropy brings women together to foster the future, preparing foster youth for a successful adulthood. A dynamic group of businesswomen, homemakers and community leaders, Women in Philanthropy members raise funds, hold drives and provide trainings focused on helping foster youth rise to their dreams. The group also is a partner in United Way’s $en$e-Ability project, helping foster youth become financially self-sufficient through financial literacy courses and individual development accounts that provide a matched savings program. For more information, visit www.yourlocalunitedway.org/wip.

Sacramento County’s Gifts from the Heart is an annual holiday gift-giving program that operates on donations and benefits children and seniors who are in the Department of Health and Human Services’ system of care. For more information, call (916) 875-2027.

Disclosure: Kristin Thébaud is the marketing consultant for United Way California Capital Region, as well as other local nonprofits and philanthropic companies.

Child safety improves as CPS takes fewer kids

2011-09-07T12:42:28Z

After years of holding the dubious distinction of tearing apart families at one of the highest rates in California, Sacramento County finally has brought its rate of child removal in line with the state average, the Sacramento Bee reported Monday.

But the Bee left out some good news: The two key measures of safety used by the federal government show that, as entries into foster care declined, child safety improved.

Apparently even with budget cuts, setting clear standards and doing a better job of weeding out false reports and trivial cases has given workers more time to focus on finding children in real danger.

One would think the fact that Sacramento County used to be the child removal capital of California was unknown to the Bee before Monday – since that’s the first time I saw it reported in that newspaper. In fact, reporter Margie Lundstrom was aware of this, but I have never seen it in any of her stories. Lundstrom has been Sacramento media’s biggest cheerleader for the county’s previous, failed take-the-child-and-run approach to child welfare.

In contrast, Brad Branan, who reported Monday’s story, apparently takes the refreshing position that readers are entitled to all sides of a story.

Of course, some Sacramento Press readers have known about the county’s dubious distinction for more than a year – it was the subject of a series of stories I wrote for the Press in 2010.

Those stories also outlined the enormous harm done to children when they are torn needlessly from everyone they know and love and consigned to foster care, and they discussed the significant risk of abuse in foster care itself.

Now, at last, the Bee acknowledges that, as Monday’s story put it:

Even those charged with advocating for abused and neglected children accused the agency of overreaching. "They were removing too many children," said Bob Wilson of Sacramento Child Advocates, which provided legal representation for children in Juvenile Dependency Court for almost 20 years, before losing its contract in July.

The Bee notes that the number of children torn from their homes declined from 2,391 in 2008 to 1,005 in 2010, according to county data. Unfortunately, data from a comprehensive database maintained by the University of California, Berkeley show that the rate of removal is increasing again, but not to its previous level.

That same database tracks the two key measures used by the federal government to assess child safety, the percentage of maltreated children who are maltreated again within six months and the percentage of children sent home from foster care who are removed again within 12 months.

During the same time period that entries into care declined, both of these measures improved.

Now, instead of being the child removal capital of California, Sacramento’s rate of removal is about average for the state’s larger counties, when entries into care are compared with the number of impoverished children in each county. Full details are in NCCPR’s updated California Rate-of-Removal Index available here: http://www.nccpr.org/reports/2009californiaror.pdf

But Sacramento can do better still.

Orange County does almost as well as Sacramento on one safety indicator, and significantly better on the other. But Orange County removes children at a rate more than 20 percent lower than Sacramento.

The Bee story notes concerns by Wilson and others that, as a result of budget cuts, the county may be overlooking children in real danger. And it cites a report from the CPS Oversight Committee which found lapses in investigations of cases that ended in tragedy.

But sadly, both problems existed even before the budget cuts – when Sacramento was squandering money on tearing apart all those families needlessly. The data suggest that these problems remain serious and real, but they occur less often now.

Another concern is the elimination of a key prevention program, the family maintenance unit. That program provided voluntary help to families before problems reached the point where CPS intervention was needed. Eliminating that program may indeed set the stage for future tragedies.

But there is a way to revive it without adding to the total budget of the agency. The agency can free up a lot of money by ending the barbaric practice of parking children at that very expensive relic of 19th Century child welfare, the Children’s Receiving Home. I discussed the problems with using the home in this story last year.

CPS actually faces a bigger challenge than money: maintaining its smart, sensible new approach in the face of the next horror story. You can bet that those wedded to the disgraced take-the-child-and-run approach are just waiting for the next tragedy so they can scapegoat the reforms – and hope everybody forgets that the same tragedies occurred when the county was tearing apart far more families. And you can bet Margie Lundstrom will be glad to oblige them with a front-page story parroting their views and ignoring all dissent.

By now, however, perhaps the leadership in county government and the people of Sacramento County know better than to be fooled again.

Former journalist Richard Wexler is Executive Director of the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform, based in Alexandria Va. The full NCCPR California Rate of Removal Index and comprehensive recommendations for reforming child welfare in California and nationwide are available at www.nccpr.org

The Underground World of CPS

2010-07-21T11:43:02Z

It is amazing to me all the road blocks that Sacramento County CPS puts up to make it nearly impossible for a parent to assert their rights and fight for what is rightfully theirs--their children. In the past four years I have seen, heard, and experienced things that would ignite fear and furor in Americans…if only they knew about it. However, these actions of which I speak are closely guarded under the cloak of confidentiality that hides Juvenile Dependency Court and involuntary child custody proceedings from the public. At first guess, you assume that this so-called “confidentiality” is in place to protect the children in these cases. However, it doesn’t take long for a person to realize the protection is not for the children but rather the protection of CPS and their corrupt policies and actions.

The actions of CPS thrive in a underground world where warrant-less search of a home and seizure of a child is common practice. A world where due process rights violations occur on a daily basis. A world where a child can be removed from the home, detained, and placed into protective custody simply because there is a potential for abuse. Even if there is no history of abuse, sign of abuse, a witness to the abuse, or admittance of abuse. Within this hidden system the parent's and the children's rights are concealed and when a parent finally realizes their rights it’s too late and their child is gone forever. This well run factory shuffles families in and out daily in robotic fashion without real care or concern for children, parents, or extended family members.

Court-appointed attorneys argue cases with the judge, come to an agreement, call in the parties involved (children, parents, others that have the ability to intervene such as a Native American Tribe), and then call the case. Parents are forced to make split-second decisions without informed consent and sometimes the court-appointed attorneys will make decisions and motions without the parents' knowledge. These court-appointed attorneys will out-right refuse their clients requests and/or motions. This is clearly ineffective assistance of counsel which should afford you the right to a Marsden hearing. However, that right is usually denied too. If a Marsden hearing is actually had, the judge can choose NOT to release your attorney, NOT appoint you another attorney, and can even choose NOT to allow you to represent yourself if you so choose. In essence your stuck with an attorney that refuses to represent you in your best interest.

Sacramento CPS says bias against birth mother may have contributed to foster child’s abuse

2010-06-25T19:08:12Z

Bias against the birth mother of Amariana Crenshaw led Sacramento County Child Protective Services workers to “discount” her concerns that Amariana was being abused in her foster home, according to an internal review released by CPS Thursday.

Amariana was taken from her parents, only to die under mysterious circumstances in a foster home with a long history of serious problems.

That is the lead that should have begun the Sacramento Bee’s story today about the release of CPS’ internal investigation into Amariana’s death.

But that would contradict the birth parent-bashing “master narrative” that has dominated child welfare coverage in the Bee (as is discussed in this previous post). So not only is this not the lead, this information does not appear in the Bee’s story at all.

Nor is there a link to the full report on the Bee website. So I requested the report from Sacramento County CPS, which promptly provided it. Since the Bee failed to do it, I’ve now posted the report on the NCCPR website.

According to Finding #5:

Evident in this review was the belief that all reports of alleged maltreatment [of Amariana while in foster care] emanated from the mother and were driven not by her concern for her children, but by her anger at Ms. Dossman [the foster mother].
• Numerous allegations appear to have been discounted based upon a bias in favor of the foster parent and against the credibility of the reporting party.
• This bias also contributed to unresolved discrepancies in findings among oversight agencies which were further exacerbated by a lack of inter-agency communication.

Since the bias within the agency is so similar to the bias in the Bee newsroom, Finding #5 never made it into the Bee’s story. So give CPS credit for this much: Unlike the Bee, at least in this one case, CPS acknowledged the bias.

But CPS failed to acknowledge that the bias permeates Sacramento County child welfare. And that may explain why none of the “Action Items” in the report addresses this problem. Instead, the solutions tend to be bureaucratic, involving more forms to fill out, more boxes to check off on each form and more “consultation” and “coordination.”

The paperwork is not meaningless. The solutions do, in fact, make sense – and if they could be implemented successfully they would help a little around the edges.

But in the real world of Sacramento County child welfare, they will increase the workload for frontline staff who already lack the time to do their jobs. And that, of course, is because Sacramento County, the child removal capital of California, overloads its workers with false allegations, trivial cases and children who never needed to be taken away in the first place. This also tempts workers to overcrowd foster homes and lower standards for foster parents.

That is the elephant in the room, and CPS' review of Amariana's death pretends it isn’t there. There are no recommendations to deal with the problem of wrongful removal, which drives everything else.

So what will cause the next tragedy? Quite possibly some overwhelmed caseworker who didn’t do everything she was supposed to do – because she was too busy complying with one of the new procedures put in place in response to this tragedy.

County leaders pass budget with at least 725 layoffs

2010-06-18T03:20:44Z

At least 725 county employees will be laid off as a result of the county budget approved by the Board of Supervisors Thursday in a 3-2 vote.

The board has now balanced its the county's budget, which had a $181 million gap. The total budget for the 2010/2011 fiscal year is $3.5 billion. Of that amount, $1.9 billion makes up the county’s general fund.

Supervisors held lengthy meetings on the budget over the course of four days this week.

Supervisors Roberta MacGlashan and Roger Dickinson voted against the budget’s general fund allocations, offering different reasons for why they disagreed with the budget. Supervisors Don Nottoli, Susan Peters and Jimmie Yee voted in support of passing the budget, which led to its approval just after 3 p.m.

MacGlashan said she could not vote in favor of the budget because it did not put enough money toward public safety.

“This budget tells the residents of the unincorporated area they’re on their own,” she said.

Dickinson objected to the budget because he said he thought it did not make social services a higher priority. While public safety is the board’s top priority, he said, it’s not the board’s only priority.

“We have an obligation, a duty, particularly as a county, to address those who are the least among us,” he said.

Supervisor Don Nottoli said he felt he had a responsibility to pass a budget for the county, even though the budget includes compromises.

“The bottom line is that there’s not sufficient funding,” Nottoli said. “Yes, we prioritize and we make decisions.”

Major cuts to public safety and social services programs and departments are included in the budget.

Before the board passed its budget, it lessened the damage to some departments. Sacramento County Sheriff John McGinness said earlier this week that the department faced a $37.6 million budget gap.

Because the board moved additional dollars to McGinness’s department Thursday, the sheriff’s deficit was lowered to $19.8 million.

McGinness declined to estimate how many layoffs his department would need to make to balance out his budget.

“Everything’s on the table at this point,” McGinness said after the hearing. “We need to find a way to live within our new budgetary constraint, which just got constricted by another $20 million dollars.”

The layoff figures are not final at this point, according to Nav Gill, the county’s chief operations officer. However, there could be more than 725, he said.

The county refers to the budget that was passed Thursday as the “recommended budget.” That’s because it will look at its figures again in September, after hearing how the state’s budget will affect the county.

Ann Edwards-Buckley, director of the county’s Health and Human Services Department, said her department was cut in several areas, including public health services, public health nursing, Child Protective Services and in-home support.

“We’ll have significant reductions in health care services for the poor,” she said.

The public can watch Monday's meeting here. View Tuesday's hearings here. Watch the video of Wednesday's meeting here.

Photo of Supervisors Roberta MacGlashan and Don Nottoli by Anthony Bento.

Kathleen Haley is a staff reporter for The Sacramento Press.

Sacramento: Child removal capital of California

2010-06-15T13:11:12Z

Sacramento is now California’s capital in more ways than one.Data released today by the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform show that Sacramento County is the child removal capital of California.

Among the state’s larger counties, Sacramento County takes away proportionately more children than any other, when the number of children taken away is compared to the number of impoverished children in each county. Sacramento takes children at a rate nearly double the average for these counties.

NCCPR released its latest California Rate of Removal Index Monday. It’s available on our website here.

The Index shows that in recent years, much of California has made remarkable progress in reducing the trauma of needless foster care and making children safer. But that hasn’t happened in Sacramento. And while progress is threatened everywhere by budget cuts, in Sacramento County, progress also is threatened by the take-the-child-and-run mentality that makes all children less safe.

(NCCPR’s ranking of counties factors in child poverty because we believe it is the fairest way to compare county performance. But when entries are compared to total child population, Sacramento County still performs atrociously, with the second worst rate of removal, only slightly better than Imperial County).

HOW FAMILY PRESERVATION MAKES CHILDREN SAFER

Given the kinds of child welfare stories that have made headlines in Sacramento for the past few years, some may be tempted to applaud the county’s status as number one in child removal. After all, “gut instinct” says that if we just take more and more children from their parents, those children will be safer.

But the best way to fix a child welfare system often is to listen to gut instinct – and do the opposite. That’s because tearing apart families unnecessarily doesn’t just do enormous harm to the children needlessly taken. It also steals time and resources from finding children in real danger – and that almost always is the real reason for the tragedies that make headlines in Sacramento County.

Many counties that take proportionately fewer children do better than Sacramento on the two key measures of child safety used by the federal government to evaluate child welfare systems.

That’s because, contrary to the common stereotype, most parents who lose their children to foster care are neither brutally abusive nor hopelessly addicted. Far more common are cases in which a family’s poverty is confused with child ‘neglect.’

Several studies have found that 30 percent of America’s foster children could be home right now if their parents just had decent housing. And single parents, desperate to keep their low-wage jobs when the sitter doesn’t show, may have to choose between staying home and getting fired, or going to work and having their children taken on ‘lack of supervision’ charges. Other cases fall between the extremes, the parents neither all victim nor all villain.

Sacramento County children are victims of a “take-the-child-and-run” mentality that has been part of the culture of Child Protective Services for at least 14 years. And every time there is an attempt to bring needless removal under control, scapegoating of family preservation by The Sacramento Bee, in the wake of a high-profile tragedy, starts another “foster-care panic” – a sharp, sudden increase in child removals, fueled by caseworkers terrified of landing on the front page if they leave a child in his own home and something goes wrong.

One sign of such panic can be found in a report released Thursday by the Sacramento County Grand Jury. According to that report, of all the children torn from their families by Child Protective Services, about a third are sent home again within 30 days. That’s plenty of time to do great harm to a child’s psyche. But if a child can be sent back home in a month, odds are that child never needed to be taken away in the first place.

THE MOST DANGEROUS PHRASE IN CHILD WELFARE

Attacks on family preservation typically are justified with the false claim that only adults suffer when children are taken needlessly and agencies have to “err on the side of the child.”

In fact, there probably is no phrase in the child welfare lexicon that has done more harm to children than “err on the side of the child.”
When a child is thrown needlessly into foster care, he loses not only mom and dad but often brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, grandparents, teachers, friends and classmates. For a young enough child it can be an experience akin to a kidnapping. A major study of foster care “alumni” found they had twice the rate of post-traumatic stress disorder of Gulf War veterans and only 20 percent could be said to be ‘doing well.’ How can throwing children into a system which churns out walking wounded four times out of five be “erring on the side of the child”?

Two more studies, of more than 15,000 typical cases, found that even maltreated children left in their own homes with little or no help fared better, on average, than comparably-maltreated children placed in foster care.

All the harm of foster care can occur even when the foster home is a good one. The majority are. But the rate of abuse in foster care is far higher than generally realized and far higher than revealed by official statistics, which involve agencies investigating themselves. That same alumni study found that one-third of foster children said they’d been abused by a foster parent or another adult in a foster home.

Switching to orphanages won’t help -- the record of institutions is even worse.

Furthermore, the more a foster care system is overwhelmed with children who don’t need to be there, the less safe it becomes, as agencies are tempted to overcrowd foster homes and lower standards for foster parents. That probably goes a long way to explaining the tragic case of Amariana Crenshaw, who died under mysterious circumstances in a foster home with a long history of serious problems.
If a child is taken from a perfectly safe home only to be beaten, raped or killed in foster care, how is that “erring on the side of the child”?

None of this means no child ever should be taken from her or his parents. Rather, it means that foster care is an extremely toxic intervention that must be used sparingly and in small doses. But for more than a decade, Sacramento County has been prescribing mega-doses of foster care.

CPS: ONLY DAMNED IF THEY DON’T

Sacramento County child protective services might well respond by claiming to be “damned if they do and damned if they don’t.”
Don’t believe it. In 34 years of following child welfare, I have never seen a caseworker fired, demoted, suspended, reprimanded or so much as slapped on the wrist for taking away too many children. All of these things have happened to workers who left even one child in her or his own home and had something go wrong.

When it comes to taking away children, caseworkers are not damned if they do and damned if they don’t – they’re only damned if they don’t.

And that’s one reason why Sacramento is the child removal capital of California.

Is Sacramento County CPS really in danger due to recent funding cuts?

2010-05-12T18:59:56Z

There have been many articles in the Sacramento Bee recently about the fact that CPS is losing all of their funding, the State of CA is not giving them money, and terrifying people by telling them children will be in more danger because there won't be enough people to ensure child safety. However, after researching statistics, it became clear to me that Sacramento County Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) and Child Protective Services (CPS) are crying wolf just so they have another excuse for their incompetency. CPS is in desperate need of a "way out". They are blaming their failures on a lack of money because of recent funding cuts instead of taking responsibility and being accountable for the failures, incompentantcies, and issues relating to cover-ups. These issues of unaccountabililty, failures at every level of CPS, incompetancies, secrecy, and cover-ups are well documented through several investigations into Sacramento CPS.
The Child Welfare League of America provided the following numbers for the most recent studies:
California received $1,795,256,381 (nearly 1.8 BILLION) in federal funds divided into the following categories:
70.8% was from Title IV-E Foster Care and Adoption Assistance
13.9% was from TANF (a.k.a. WELFARE-food stamps, cash aid)
9.9% was from the Social Services Block Grant
4.2% was from Title IV-B CWS Promoting Safe & Stable Families
1.8% was from Medicaid
1% was from other federal services
That means that the State of CA received $1,271,041,517 (nearly 1.3 BILLION) in federal dollars from Title IV-E Foster Care and Adoption assistance. To fully understand the problematic issues with this, you would need to understand how States qualify for Foster Care and Adoption Assistance funds. A bill was passed in 1997, which provides this money to the Department of Social Services in the amount of $4000- $6000 for each child they get adopted out. But wait...there’s more. In the book WARNING! The Truth about CPS, Don Lyons explains that it’s “just a starting figure in a complex mathematical formula in which each bonus is multiplied by the percentage that the state has managed to exceed its baseline adoption number. The states must maintain this increase in each successive year. [Like compound interest.]”. Basically it means that each year the state has to exceed the number of adoptions from the previous year in order to receive these funds. What?
When I first began to understand how it worked, I had to sit back and let it settle with me. I had such a hopeless feeling and the only thing flashing in my mind was the old quote "Money is the root of all evil.". Well yes, of course it is. Then I realized our government is not immune to greed, especially during tough economic times when funding for programs is dramatically cut. Another quote came to mind soon after that. "The road to hell is paved with good intentions". I have no doubt that this bill was passed with good intentions. The need to get children adopted into permanent families is very important for a child instead of rotating them from numerous foster homes, group homes, etc. For children that were removed from their homes because legitimate allegations, finding them a permanent home and family is an amazing thing. However, in my opinion, nobody really looked at the huge holes in this bill. The simple fact that they need to exceed their baseline adoptions for the fiscal year, creates a child mill in which more and more children must enter the system each year in order to increase the number of adoptions out of foster care.
The bill that was passed includes a technical support assistance section "to assist State and local communities to reach their targets for increased numbers of adoptions”. It goes on to say the support is for “the development of best practice guidelines for expending the termination of parental rights…the development of special units and expertise in moving children toward adoption as a permanent goal; [and] models to encourage the fast tracking of children who have not attained one year of age into pre-adoptive placements without waiting for termination of parental rights.” By implementing these policies they are putting a bounty on the heads of American children…your children! CPS and DHHS are denying parents rights and setting parents up for failure before they walk out of your home with your child in hand. Without knowledge of their rights, parents have no chance to protect themselves and their children until it’s too late.
The Nation Center for Policy Analysis says it best: “The way the federal government reimburses States [actually] rewards a growth in the size of the program instead of the effective care of children.”
I often hear people upset about “lazy parents” that don’t take care of their kids and live off the “system” with taxpayers’ dollars. However, it is clear by the funding figures I provide above, that only 13% of funding is from TANF (aka Welfare). It is also amazing that 70.8% is for foster care and adoption assistance, but only 4.2% is to promote safe and stable families. Perhaps if our government promoted family preservation instead of family destruction, it would make crime rates go down, decrease inmate population, decrease the homeless population, decrease unemployment rates, and decrease the amount of welfare recipients. This in turn would probably decrease the amount of children that are abused and/or neglected.